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Could the young but realize how soon they will become mere walking bundles of habits, they would give more heed to their conduct while in the plastic state.

William James

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William James
Age: 68 †
Born: 1842
Born: January 11
Died: 1910
Died: August 26
Philosopher
Physician
Psychologist
University Teacher
W. James
States
Habit
Giving
Walking
Bundles
Would
Realize
Heed
Realizing
Conduct
State
Plastic
Become
Habits
Young
Mere
Give
Soon

More quotes by William James

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The same is true of Love, and the instinctive desire to please those whom we love. The teacher who succeeds in getting herself loved by the pupils will obtain results which one of a more forbidding temperament finds it impossible to secure.
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Act as if what you do makes a difference. It does.
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When happiness is actually in possession, the thought of evil can no more acquire the feeling of reality than the thought of good can gain reality when melancholy rules. To the man actively happy, from whatever cause, evil simply cannot then and there be believed in.
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So to feel brave, act as if we were brave, use all our will to that end...and a courage-fit will very likely replace the fit of fear.
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With mere good intentions hell is proverbially paved.
William James
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You perceive now, my friends, what your general or abstract duty is as teachers. Although you have to generate in your pupils a large stock of ideas, any one of which may be inhibitory, yet you must also see to it that no habitual hesitancy or paralysis of the will ensues, and that the pupil still retains his power of vigorous action.
William James
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Geniuses are commonly believed to excel other men in their power of sustained attention . . . But it is their genius making them attentive, not their attention making geniuses of them.
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No decision is, in itself, a decision.
William James
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Life shall be built in doing and suffering and creating.
William James
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The amount of psychology which is necessary to all teachers need not be very great.
William James
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Nothing is so fatiguing as the eternal hanging on of an uncompleted task.
William James
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Habit is thus the enormous fly-wheel of society, its most precious conservative agent. It alone is what keeps us all within the bounds of ordinance.
William James
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Impulse without reason is enough, and reason without impulse is a poor makeshift.
William James
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All the higher, more penetrating ideals are revolutionary. They present themselves far less in the guise of effects of past experience than in that of probable causes of future experience, factors to which the environment and the lessons it has so far taught us must learn to bend.
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Success or failure depends more upon attitude than upon capacity successful men act as though they have accomplished or are enjoying something. Soon it becomes a reality. Act, look, feel successful, conduct yourself accordingly, and you will be amazed at the positive results.
William James
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To improve the golden moment of opportunity, and catch the good that is within our reach, is the great art of life.
William James
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The question of free will is insoluble on strictly psychological grounds.
William James
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The good or bad is not in the circumstance, but only in the mind...that encounters it.
William James
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Don't preach too much to your pupils or abound in good talk in the abstract. Lie in wait rather for the practical opportunities, be prompt to seize those as they pass, and thus at one operation get your pupils both to think, to feel, and to do.
William James
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The mind, in short, works on the data it receives very much as a sculptor works on his block of stone. In a sense the statue stoodthere from eternity. But there were a thousand different ones beside it, and the sculptor alone is to thank for having extricated this one from the rest.
William James